Generally, a Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) under ISO/IEC (International Organization for Standardization/International Electro-technical Commission) and a Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) under ITU-T (International Telecommunications Union-Telecommunication Standardization sector) have jointly configured a Joint Video Team (JVT), such that they have proposed a new standard capable of implementing a video image compression performance superior to those of the MPEG-4 Part 2 standard and the H.263 standard. Representative examples of the above-mentioned new standard are an MPEG-4 AVC (MPEG-4 Part 10: Advanced Video Coding) proposed by the ISO/IEC and the H.264 standard proposed by the ITU-T.
There must be developed a new method for encoding moving picture or moving images, such that it must maximize compression efficiency, and must suitably cope with a variety of terminals and variable communication environments. With the above-mentioned demands of the aforementioned enhanced encoding method, the JVT acting as a collaboration team of the ISO/IEC and the ITU-T is conducting intensive research into the standardization of Scalable Video Coding (SVC) based on H.264/AVC.
The scalable video coding (SVC) basically includes three scalability methods, i.e., temporal scalability, spatial scalability, and SNR scalability.
The spatial scalability has been executed by an inter-layer prediction process, and the SVC provides the increase of coding efficiency.
The above-mentioned inter-layer prediction calculates a high correlation between several layers, such that the overlapping information can be removed from the resultant images by an inter-layer prediction process. Therefore, a variety of prediction methods capable of performing the inter-layer prediction must be developed.